WLJ: Little by little

Hooray!

That's the word that came to mind when I stepped on the scale this morning.  I really didn't know what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised at the number that showed up.

I have to confess -- there have been times in my life and even in recent weeks when I thought, "Maybe this is the weight I'm supposed to be.  Maybe I should just accept it and give up."  A lot of people tell me they don't see me as fat or overweight. And maybe I'm not.  Maybe I'm just fine.  But I feel unhealthy in my present state of body.  I don't like the way some of my clothes look on me.  It's definitely time to make some changes, and little by little, I am.

Losing weight, like a lot of other things is all about setting goals -- big ones and little ones.

I thought about this last night when I was running.  After nearly a year of inconsistent training, I still can't run an entire 5K.  Lately, I've been programming a 3K into my ipod and just working on that.  Sometimes even that's a struggle.  Last night, for example, I was ready to quit when I was less than 1K into the run.  But I told myself I needed to run at least half of it.  And then, when I hit the halfway mark, I told myself I should run at least 2K of it.  And then, when I hit that mark, I told myself I could finish it.  In between those points, there was a lot of, "I don't know if I can do this," going through my head.  But when the voice told me I was done, I smiled.  I'd made it.  Little by little, and milestone by milestone.  My body knew I could do it, but I'm still working to convince my brain.  Hopefully in a few months, I'll be telling you I ran an entire 5K. (I'm signed up for one in October, so I better keep moving.)

Translating that into weight-loss, I am correlating my goals with big events I have coming up. I have written down where I want to be by my birthday (which is just a few weeks away), my trip to California in August,  my trip to Vegas in September and, finally, my friend's wedding in November.  I hope to be at my goal by that last one, or at least very close to it.

By the way, I've been surpassing the 12 activity points benchmark consistently for the past few weeks.  Flying past it, actually.   So I'm raising the bar to 20.  I think that's completely doable if I do some sort of workout five days each week.

Weight-loss goal: 40 lbs.
This week's progress: -2.4 lb.
Progress to date (since 4/26/11): - 7.2 lbs.